Ahmeida Al-Masirdi Al-Tayyib - Wasini Al-Araj

Today, as I present this collection of short stories, I remember an important event, more than a quarter of a century after the publication of the first and second editions of these stories, in Damascus and Algeria respectively. At a time when it was celebrated in Damascus, and specifically in the Ministry of Culture, and many Arab critics wrote about it with encouraging enthusiasm, describing it as literature coming from a land known for its Francophone writings more than its Arabic writings, the collection itself was confiscated in its Algerian edition, in Algeria itself, under the pretext of hidden ideology. The dedication alone was enough to confiscate the collection. The book was crushed, and only twenty copies were released that were granted to me under the author’s rights, no more than that, as if the author’s right stopped at this point and did not extend to his right to see his book distributed, read, and written about.